Page 1 Complexity, Genuine Uncertainty, and the Economics of Organization by Richard N. Langlois and Michael J. Everett Published in Human Systems Management 11(2): 67-75 (1992). Introduction. Economists pay more attention today than ever before to the problems the economic agent faces because of the complexity of the world and the unknowability of the future. Indeed, some see the economic problem as having to do precisely with these phenomena. But many fail to see an important difference between complexity and uncertainty, 1 and instead choose to collapse the two into one. 2 We argue that the distinction is crucial. Merging complexity and uncertainty blurs important differences in the types of organizations and market structures that arises to meet these two problems of knowledge. 1 For instance, Herbert Simon seems to believe that humans could actually conquer complexity if they were not bounded by their rationality, that is, if they possessed the computational ability to handle the complexity (Langlois 1990). Brian Loasby (1976, 1989) is one of the few economists to recognize a difference; in fact, Loasby (1986) reaches the many of the same organizational conclusions as we do here, albeit by a somewhat different route. 2 Thus we see an economist like Williamson (1985, pp. 56-61) describing uncertainty in terms of bounded rationality and the complexity of the contracting process.